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Your morning five: Mounties accused of perjury file complaints

1. Mounties accused of perjury file complaints. CBC reports the two officers are Const. Gerry Rundel and retired corporal Monty Robinson, who both stand accused of perjury related to an inquiry into the 2007 death of Robert Dziekanski. Four officers allegedly involved in Dziekanski’s death all testified they hadn’t discussed the incident with each other. Last year, Janice Norgard claimed they’d all met at her house to talk things over. Rundel and Robinson claim that Vancouver police failed to properly investigate Norgard’s claims, and they hope the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner will listen.

2. Residential schools hearings come to an end. A four-year process of storytelling and personal healing that crossed Canada, visited more than 300 communities, and heard from more than 6,500 residential-school survivors wrapped up on the weekend. Winnipeg was the first city to host a hearing of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in June 2010. Edmonton was last. Last week, commission head Justice Murray Sinclair warned the feds could ignore some of his key recommendations. The government denied the claim.

3. Police occupy Rio slum. Brazil intends to host the World Cup without a hitch, and security forces are on the front lines of that effort. Yesterday, 1,000 police and troops took control of a favela, Mare, in Rio de Janeiro. The area’s a known source of drug traffickers. Brazil calls the effort to clean up the streets a Pacification Programme—an ominous name for an operation fronted by tanks and armed officers. The first match, on June 12, nears.

4. Japan’s whaling isn’t all about science. The International Court of Justice ruled that Japan’s annual killing of 1,000 whales near Antarctica may include scientific elements, but the pursuit contravenes a 1986 ban on commercial whaling. No longer will Japanese dining options include the giant mammal from the deep blue sea. Greenpeace is a bunch of happy campers, but they say they won’t stop until the “dying industry”—that of commercial whaling—”is ended for good.”

5. Dimitri Soudas is out of a job. The Conservative Party is without an executive director after Soudas, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s pick for the job last December over the apparent objections of all kinds of party officials, was booted from the post yesterday. Few advisers have lingered in the PM’s inner circle as long as Soudas, who first took a job with Harper nine years ago. Even that kind of loyalty didn’t save Soudas, who got tangled up in a political battle involving his fiancée, Eve Adams. Harper is said to have approved Soudas’s dismissal, no doubt with some embarrassment.